For many years, people have become increasingly dependent on their mobile devices. In parallel, people are also accessing a growing number and types of media on the internet. Today's streaming technologies for media sources provide multiple ABR streaming bit rates, and a priori, select the bit rates for encoding the media sources. However, challenges occur when providing the same streaming access to these media sources to mobile devices, as mobile devices and other residential networks typically do not have the same transcoder resources as more complex network media gateways. Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and system for efficiently and effectively providing access to streaming media in a network or device with limited transcoder resources.